Solana DEX Jupiter Dominates Uniswap in Stablecoin and Airdrop Frenzy

The decentralized exchange Jupiter, which is based on the Solana blockchain, has experienced a surge in trading volumes, reaching $480 million in the past 24 hours. This increase in activity can be attributed to the launch of a new memecoin airdrop and a rise in stablecoin swaps. Interestingly, Jupiter has even surpassed the trading volumes of Uniswap, a popular decentralized exchange on the Ethereum blockchain, by $10 million. According to CoinGecko, the combined trading volume of Uniswap’s V2 and V3 protocols only amounted to $470 million in the same time period.

A significant portion of Jupiter’s daily trading volume, approximately $50 million, came from the buying and selling of “Wen,” a memecoin created by the developers of Jupiter. This memecoin was distributed to Solana users who had previously interacted with Jupiter within the last six months, as well as owners of Solana’s Saga phone. The primary purpose of Wen was to serve as an experiment leading up to the launch of Jupiter’s native token, JUP, which is scheduled for release on January 31.

The majority of trading activity on Jupiter over the past day was related to the exchange of Solana for Circle’s USD Coin and Tether stablecoins, accounting for $191 million of the total daily volume. Based on trades occurring on the decentralized exchange Aevo, pre-market JUP tokens are currently being traded at around $0.61 per token. If these prices hold, the estimated total value of the 1 billion JUP tokens to be airdropped could exceed $600 million.

The excitement surrounding the memecoin Wen and the upcoming release of the JUP token coincides with a series of airdrops announced by various projects in the cryptocurrency ecosystem. AltLayer, an Ethereum scaling solution, revealed a $100 million airdrop for its users on January 25. Dymension, a multilayer rollup deployer, is preparing to launch its mainnet soon and plans to distribute a total of 70 million DYM tokens, valued at approximately $210 million, to eligible users.